Quora: a tech journalist's utopia, but what does it mean for journalism at large?

"Feels like quora.com just went viral today after months of quiet.
Are others seeing lots of new 'follows' as the world checks it out?,"
Harward Law professor Jonathan Zittrain tweeted last night.

There's certainly been an influx to the question and answer site over the past week, especially by journalists. It might be because various sites singled out Quora, launched in December 2009 by former Facebook executives Charlie Cheever and Adam D'Angelo, as "the new Twitter" in their predictions for 2011.

Quora is a tech journalist's utopia, but as more and more media professionals join, the question will be whether it can benefit journalism at large.

Quora combines a social graph (it allows you to follow
people in the same way as Twitter, and connect with the people you
follow on other networks) with an interest graph (it allows you to
follow the topics and/or questions that interest you).

But it is the current user base, with lots of Silicon Valley and
other internet start-up executives participating in discussions and
willingly answering questions, that makes Quora such a useful place to
be for tech writers, something that might change as the site becomes
more popular and attracts a more diverse group of readers.

As more journalists have joined the network over the last week there
has been a surge in journalism related questions and discussions. If
your beat is among those discussed there, the site can be extremely
useful for access, ideas, story leads, networking and crowd sourcing. In
other words, much of the same things as Twitter, but not confined to
140 characters.

However, for the general news reporter there seems to be very little
use of the site other than as a way to keep up to date on social
networking trends. Previously, we have seen similar sites, such as Yahoo
Answers, Malaho and Aardvark, fail to take off and, in the case of
Yahoo Answers, seeing a rapid decline in the quality of responses as it
grew bigger. That's a cost of success that may come to haunt Quora as
well.

There are signs on Quora of a social medium about to go mainstream. More than one Q&A by 'Quora veterans', for example,
listing up the site's guidelines and strongly encouraging newcomers to
listen and acquaint themselves with the site's culture before
starting to ask all sorts of questions.

Quora
could, as some have predicted, turn out to be a big hit among
tech-opiners and then be over before the average consumer has even
caught a whiff of it. For my part, as a tech writer, I love the site,
only constant deadline pressure prevents me from spending entire days
there. It has made me more positive to the prospects of Facebook
questions, yet to be launched in Europe, potentially being useful.

But should most of the world's journalists invade, it remains to be
seen how long big shots find Quora an attractive place to be.